Casino News: DraftKings NFT, Omicron In Macau

This week’s casinos news starts off with one of the hottest trends right now: NFT’s. Let’s see how these two realms are experiencing some harmony.

DraftKings NFT Plans Spark Interest

DraftKings recently announced that they are expanding their NFT plans. Their original launch has sparked a lot of interest but their offering hasn’t really been on a blockchain. Now they’re thinking about moving those NFT’s to Polygon, a layer two solution used for Ethereum. This isn’t all too surprising considering that DraftKings partnered up with Polygon back in October. They made the deal back when the platform was ranked 21^st in market value in terms of cryptocurrencies. Fast forward to today, and the value has helped it jump up to the 14^th spot.

Apparently, Polygon has a five-to-one add-to-remove ratio, meaning that five people are investing every time one person leaves. They offer the ability to use the Ethereum blockchain for users but with much smaller gas fees. DraftKings being a viable partner is only going to help gain more attention for Polygon.

DraftKings also has a partnership with Autograph, who has been openly backed up by Tom Brady. They also have NFT deals with many other popular sports figures like Derek Jeter, Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, and Tony Hawk. We’ll see if they end up moving those to Polygon.

Omicron COVID-19 Variant Has Appeared In Macau

Macau has already been struggling to overcome the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and it looks like things could be getting worse. They have just announced that a single Omicron case has been identified in Macau. The good news is an outbreak hasn’t happened yet but we know just how contagious it can be. The resident with the variant is a local that just so happened to take a trip to the United States and stopped in Singapore on the way back. They are in isolation but it’s too early to say if that’s enough.

Macau obviously can’t hold the virus completely out of the area but they have ramped up testing so that it doesn’t progressively get worse like it did in 2020. There was a minor rise in COVID cases over the past month by Christmas Day, but Macau quickly got a handle on it.

The recovery process is still ongoing in the area and an Omicron uptick could set them back to square one again. Omicron is already impacting several countries including Japan. Because of that, tourism will be drastically dropping over the next couple of months. 2022 isn’t looking likely to have a hot start in terms of gambling revenue in these areas.

Playtech Launches First US Live Casino In Michigan, New Jersey

Playtech has continued to expand its menu, this time offering up what many casino players love to spend their time with: live dealer games. They’ve just announced that they have opened up two live casinos in New Jersey and Michigan. These are the first two in Playtech’s entrance into the iGaming universe in the United States. The company is already considered the largest gaming operator in both Europe and Asia.

Playtech offers an iGaming experience courtesy of Parx Interactive. Another company that they had partnered up with a few months ago. In New Jersey, Playtech is working with Bet365, a longtime partner.

It is already expected that Playtech will see a lot of growth in the United States. The dual rollout of casinos has been labeled a “landmark moment” for both the company and the US. Playtech isn’t satisfied with their results just yet as they have already mentioned diving deeper into the iGaming world and presenting an experience unlike anything else in the country.